Brilliance. Part 30

Cooper woke with a gasp, a sudden snapping of unconsciousness. Sweaty and tangled and head pounding. Struggled against his bonds, realized it was his clothes, soaked and tight, and a sheet half on him. He blinked, rubbed at his eyes, tried to put things back together.

There was a soft sigh beside him, and he looked over, saw Shannon curled around a pillow, her hair spilling across her bare neck. The bed. They were in bed back at her apartment. Had they...

No, still dressed, both of them. He had a vague memory of more drinks, and finishing the joint. A flash of dancing, the last thing he could remember. She had been a very good dancer, and beside her he'd felt big and clumsy and happy. Then nothing.

Cooper groaned, swung his legs off the bed. He'd managed to kick his shoes off, at least. He rose, head pounding, and wobbled into the bathroom. Peed for about half an hour, then stripped off his clothes and got in the shower. The controls were odd, a temperature gauge and a b.u.t.ton. He set it all the way to hot, then pressed the b.u.t.ton. A light trickle of water flowed from the showerhead, then shut off ten seconds later.

Right. The evaporators outside of town stripped what water they could from the air, and every building had a catch basin for rain, but water was eternally short here. That was one of the weaknesses of the Holdfast, a tactical advantage he'd seen plans for exploiting: destroy incoming pipes and hit the evaporators with surgical strikes. Estimated population decrease of 17 percent in two weeks, 42 percent by the end of a month, industrial and technical operational ability lowered by 31 percent. He hit the b.u.t.ton again, soaked his hair, helped himself to her shampoo when the water cut off. A hit to wash it clear, a hit to soap up, a hit to wash it off. All in all, one of the least satisfying showers he'd ever taken, and no help at all for a hangover.

He toweled dry and put on his clothes. Looked in the mirror. Game on.

Shannon was making coffee when he came out. Her hair was limp, and one side of her face creased with pillow marks. "Morning," she said, her back to him. "How you feeling?"

"Dead and buried. You?"

"Yeah." She filled the pot with water, poured it into the machine, her back to him. He watched her hands, the way they fidgeted at nothing. She opened the fridge, stared at the empty shelves. "Breakfast options are limited."

"Coffee's fine." Awkwardness in the air like last night's smoke. "Thanks."

Shannon closed the door, turned to face him. "Listen. About last night."

"Nothing to say."

"I just, I don't want you to-It was a good time, and I needed it, but I'm not-It doesn't change anything."

"Hey, you got me into bed." He smiled, let her know he was kidding. "It was good. Things have been tense. It was nice to just, you know, be normal for a night."

She nodded. Picked up the discarded beer bottles from yesterday, dropped them in the recycling. Opened a drawer, then closed it.

Cooper said, "Why are you second-guessing me?"

Shannon looked up at him. "That the kind of thing that used to bug your wife? Telling her what was on her mind?"

"Sorry."

"It's okay." She took a deep breath, let it out. "You're right. I am."

"Because we got drunk?"

"Yes. Maybe. You're different than I expected. And I'm just wondering if any of it is real." Her gaze was unwavering and unapologetic.

Cooper turned and went to the Murphy bed. Grabbed the edge of the wrinkled sheets, shook them out and laid them smooth. Whacked the pillows, then tucked them in place. He wondered what Natalie would think of Shannon, whether they would like each other, decided that they probably would. "I grew up an army brat. Joined when I was seventeen. Then the agency. All that time, I was trying to fight for something. Trying to protect...everything, I guess. I was one of the good guys. And then when they pinned the bombing on me, I was alone. In a lot of ways I'd been alone my whole life, but this was different."

He moved to the edge of the bed and folded it into the wall on smooth hinges. Turned to her, not sure where he was going even as he went. "The last months, I've been doing things I used to fight against. I've been one of the bad guys, and I've been good at it. So does that mean I was wrong before?" He shrugged. "I don't think so. I liked protecting things. I miss it."

"There are other ways," she said. "Believe it or not, I feel like one of the good guys too. I am one of them."

"Everybody is," Cooper said. "That's what makes life complicated." He knew her well enough to pattern her. She was holding something back, lying to him at least by omission. What, though? Hard to say. And besides, he couldn't blame her. He was lying to her, too.

Ain't we a pair.

"Look," he said. "Everybody's got layers. Nothing's simple. You thought I would be a humorless government operative without conscience or questions. And I thought you would be a two-dimensional fanatic who didn't care about hurting people. Now you know that I have an ex-wife, that I love hot sauce, that I dance badly, that I've read Hemingway and even remembered some of it. And I know a few things about you, too. But there are things neither of us knows. Things we're holding back." He said it lightly. "And that's okay, too. Doesn't make anything less real. Especially," he said, and rubbed at his temple, "my hangover. So how about we let things lie for now?"

For a moment she just looked at him. Then she opened a cabinet, took out two coffee mugs, filled them both. She handed one to him, and when their fingers brushed in the exchange, she didn't jump. "I'm going to go clean up."

"Okay." He sipped the coffee, watched her walk to the bathroom.

She stopped at the door. "Cooper?"

"Yeah?"

"Pills in the drawer by the sink. For your head."

He smiled at her. "Thanks."

Two hours later they were three thousand feet up.

An updraft hit, and they bounced a dozen vertical feet. His stomach rolled. "You sure you know how to fly this thing?"

She smiled from the pilot's seat in front of him. "I saw it on tri-d once. How hard can it be?"

The airfield was on the outskirts of Newton, four smooth runways crisscrossing like a pound sign. They'd left his car parked in a gravel lot, checked in at ground control, and gone to the a.s.signed hangar. The glider was futuristic looking, with broad wings and a streamlined body. Made of carbon fiber, it weighed so little that they pushed it by hand onto the runway, where Shannon hitched it to a thick, twisted cable. Inside she put on a headset, spoke in a soft, fast voice to the tower, and a moment later the cable snapped taut and yanked them almost a mile in thirty seconds, the ma.s.sive winches hauling with force sufficient to hurl them into the air. Cooper didn't mind heights, had ridden in helicopters and jets and military aircraft, and had even jumped out of a few of them, but the glider he wasn't loving.

"How long can this thing stay up?"

"You a nervous flyer?"

"No. I just like doing it in a machine with, you know, an engine."

She laughed. "Old-world thinking, Cooper. Gliders have no emissions, the winches are solar-powered, and out here, if you ride the updrafts, you can stay aloft for hours. Easiest way to get from town to town in the NCH."

"Uh-huh." He looked out the window at the patchwork ground far below. The only sound was the wind rushing beneath the broad wings, whistling over the teardrop body. The hull of the thing was about the thickness of a napkin.

"Look," she said. "No hands." She released the stick and held them up above her head.

"Jesus, would you quit? I'm hungover here."

She laughed again and banked in a slow angle that gave him a better view than he really wanted.

Tesla was in the heart of the state, and tacking from updraft to updraft, the trip took about two hours. Seeing it from the air was oddly familiar, similar to the satellite images he'd reviewed. Midsize by Holdfast standards, it was home to ten thousand people. The town was a grid centered around a complex of mirrored rectangles, energy-efficient buildings that rose four stories higher than anything else.

In one of them sat the richest man in the world.

The landing turned out to be gentle enough, not much different from coming down in any other small plane. Shannon had touched, bounced once, then smoothed the glider into a long slow run. Good flying.

There was another security check at the hanger, this one more intense. The man behind the bulletproof Plexi was affable enough, but he ran their pa.s.sports with care and spent longer than Cooper liked clicking on his datapad. Tesla was well outside of the tourist sections and protected by several more layers of sieves. The whole town was private corporate land, inside a gated community, inside a high-security munic.i.p.ality, a series of legal cla.s.sifications that basically amounted to "keep the h.e.l.l out." Cooper smiled blandly at the guard.

Half an hour later, they were pulling into Epstein Enterprises, the mirrored buildings, all sun and sky, too bright to look at. There was another security post, but Shannon had made a call this morning, and their fake names were on a list. They got in with little more than a pa.s.sport check and a scan of the vehicle.

While Epstein's official headquarters were in Manhattan, this was the true nerve center. From here, the abnorm ran his ma.s.sive financial empire, not only the development of New Canaan, but the management of thousands of patents, investments, and research projects, the total net worth of which was impossible to calculate. Money at that level was not something that could be counted; it was dynamic, a living thing that swelled and shrank and consumed the money of others, companies buying companies buying companies for fifty iterations.

The top of every building bristled with satellite dishes and security systems, among them batteries of surface-to-air missiles. Defensive, supposedly, and squeaked through on a congressional exemption that must have cost billions. Cooper remembered a plan he'd seen for a coordinated missile launch targeting the compound: expected physical efficacy of 27 percent in an initial barrage, but casualties projected at only 16 percent, less than 5 percent upper managerial.

There were no doubt plans for a nuclear option as well. One thing the DAR had was plans.

"You okay?" Shannon maneuvered the electric car they'd rented into a parking spot in a row of identical vehicles. "You've been quiet."

"The glider," he lied. "Still getting my ground legs back."

She turned off the engine. "There's something you should know. I got us in by dropping John's name."

"John?" he said. "Oh. John Smith. Hmm. Will that make him friendly?" Epstein openly and frequently disa.s.sociated himself from the terrorist movements, all of them. He had to; any link to someone like John Smith and the loopholes that kept the Holdfast safe would close swiftly and tightly. The DAR a.s.sumed that there must be some back-channel connection, but they'd never been able to find evidence of one.

"I don't know. Publically, Epstein is a pretty vocal critic. But John has a lot of friends here. Using his name was the only way I knew to get a meeting."

"So what's their relationship?"

"I don't really know. John respects Epstein, but I think he feels they're playing different roles. Some people compare them to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X."

"Lousy parallel. Dr. King fought for equality and integration, not building a separate empire, and Malcolm X may have advocated black rights by any means necessary, but he didn't run a terror network that blew up buildings."

"I don't want to argue about it."

"Fair enough," he said. "But I'm not going to pretend to be with Smith."

"You shouldn't. I wouldn't lie to him at all, if I were you."

"Not much point," he said. "I can't ask him for help if I don't tell him why I need it." Tough tightrope to walk. You have to convince a man who has everything to lose by admitting a connection to John Smith to do just that. All without telling him too much. He forced a c.o.c.ksure grin. "Thanks for this. For keeping your end."

"Yeah. Well, we had a deal." She opened the car door. "Come on. Let's go meet a billionaire."

The grounds were deserted, and given the sun blasting down from the big blue sky, he wasn't surprised. The complex had more than twenty buildings-twenty-two, if he remembered correctly-but the one they entered was at the center. It didn't look like much, none of the grand corporate styling he would have expected in Chicago or DC. Though taller than the rest, it was the same featureless solar gla.s.s. Of course. Solar gla.s.s bounces the sun's heat, transforms it to energy. Marble is heavy and needs to be shipped in. And ornate carvings are nostalgia.

Old-world thinking.

The lawyer was one of the older people Cooper had seen in the last days. Early fifties, with close-cropped silver hair and hand-tailored suit, he radiated a two-grand-an-hour vibe. "Mr. and Mrs. Cappello. I'm Robert Kobb. If you'll come with me?" He spun without waiting for an answer.

The lobby was a bright atrium with one wall dedicated to a thirty-foot tri-d screen running CNN in stunningly crisp resolution-Epstein held a 30 percent stake in Time Warner-and they'd barely set foot in it when the man met them. Cooper had expected to be kept waiting for hours if they got in at all. Apparently John Smith's name carried a lot of weight here. Was the billionaire in league with the terrorist? If so, the situation was worse than anyone had dared believe.

"How was your trip in?"

"b.u.mpy," Cooper said.

The lawyer smiled. "Gliders take some getting used to. This is your first visit to New Canaan Holdfast, correct?"

His smile is bulls.h.i.t. He knows who we are, but he's keeping to the cover story. A knowledge h.o.a.rder. "Yes."

"What do you think?"

"Very impressive."

Kobb nodded, led them past a row of elevators to the last in line, and touched his palm to a featureless plate. The doors slid silently open. "It's growing fast. You should have seen Tesla five years ago. Just dirt and sky."

The elevator moved so smoothly that Cooper couldn't say for sure if they were going up or down. He put his hands in his pockets, rocked on his heels. A moment later the doors parted, and Kobb led them out.

One side of the hall was gla.s.s floor to ceiling, the sun dialed down from blast furnace to a warm glow. The other side was an ornate garden built into a tiered wall, greenery spilling over the edges of sleek inset planters. The air felt flush with oxygen. "Nice."

"We use what we have here. And we have plenty of sun."

"Isn't it some sort of sin to waste water here?"

"They're gene-modified, spliced with some form of cactus. The water needs are miniscule. I don't really understand it," Kobb said in a way that suggested he understood perfectly well, but suspected you might not. The lawyer led them past several conference rooms, then touched another featureless spot on the wall to unlock a door at the end. "Mr. Epstein's office."

Considering the wealth in play, the room was understated. Seamless gla.s.s on two sides that gave way to a tumbling view of the city and the desert beyond, a smooth wooden desk, a conference area with comfortable seating. A pale young girl, Cooper guessed she was ten or so, sat on the couch playing a game on a d-pad. Her hair was dyed a sickly Kool-Aid green. A niece? Epstein didn't have any children.

The lawyer ignored her completely. "Please, have a seat. Erik will join us in a moment. Can I get you anything? Coffee?"

"I'm fine, thanks. Allison?"

Shannon shook her head. Instead of sitting, she glided to one of the windows, stared out at the view.

"Hi," Cooper said to the little girl. "My name's Tom."

She looked up from the datapad. Her eyes were a green almost as startling as her hair, and far too old for her body. "No it isn't," she said, then went back to her game.

He felt a snap of embarra.s.sment laced with anger, swallowed it. The girl was obviously a reader; even beyond her casual call-out on his lie, she had all the signs: antisocial tendencies, a hunger for nonhuman stimulus, the need to physically express her difference. And it wasn't really a surprise to think that Epstein would use the abilities of the gifted around him. He just hadn't expected a child.

She must be exceptionally powerful. The thought came with a wave of discomfort. To a tier-one reader, the whole world was naked emperors. Her knowledge would go beyond knowing that he was lying about his ident.i.ty; within a few minutes of listening to him, watching him, she would know things that his ex-wife didn't.

It was one of the few gifts that he really considered curses. Every moment, every human interaction, readers swam in the river of lies that made up everyday life. Worse, they picked up on the darker elements of personalities, the universal Jungian shadow of the human mind, the part that relished torture and pain and humiliation. Everyone had that shadow. For most people, it was controlled, expressed in subverted ways: p.o.r.nography, aggressive sports, violent daydreams. It was part of the human animal, and most of the time, a harmless part. Thoughts were only thoughts, after all, and these were held close.

But readers saw them all around, in every person. Every kindness was underscored by it. Daddy might protect you, but a tiny part of him wanted to hold the babysitter down and do things to her. Mommy might wipe your tears, but something in her wanted to claw your arms and shriek in your face to shut the h.e.l.l up. Unsurprisingly, readers ran to madness. The healthiest usually ended up shut-ins, locked in a tiny controlled world where they could count on the things around them.

Most committed suicide.

Robert Kobb coughed into a closed fist and said, "You'll have to forgive Millicent. She says what's on her mind."

"Nothing to forgive," Cooper said. "She's right."

"Yes, I know." Robert Kobb gave a bland smile and settled himself on the couch beside Millicent. She shied away from him without glancing from her game. Kobb said, "You're actually Nick Cooper."

"Yeah."

"Erik asked me to clear the time as soon as he heard from you this morning. He didn't tell me what this was in reference to."

Cooper flopped in one of the chairs, measured the lawyer. Something about the man bugged him. The pose of authority, calling his boss by his first name. That and his veneer of aw-shucks normalcy. "He didn't know. Ask you a question?"